"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Worship

In The Sign of Jonas, Thomas Merton wrote:

The union of ceremonies and words in the Mass is the simplest and deepest and most fundamental and also the easiest and most perfectly satisfactory way of adoring God that could be imagined.

Of course he wrote this in 1953, before the rot set in.

One advantage of the old Latin Mass is that the priest was not likely to improvise, an advantage now lost in the vernacular Mass. A priest in my parish regularly injects into the Mass the words "God, source of all Father-Love and Mother-Love," a phrase of his own invention, nowhere to be found in Sacred Scripture or in the Mass as approved by liturgical norms.

In a piano concerto, there is a place for improvisation, and that is the cadenza. In the Mass there is a place for improvisation, and that is the homily.